The Wounded Healer

/by Naomi Remen/

Illness is an altered state:
One emerges as different.
One remembers to let go
A sense of total isolation and helplessness
I am being breathed
Everything that breathes is one.

This illness is a fellow traveller
Where there’s judgement there is no healing.

If one has never felt pain
there is an instinct to avoid it.
The experience of pain
makes it possible to be there
and not have to fix it.
There’s nothing to do but care.
Not needing to fix pain
enables pain to change.
The greatest evoking of healing is illness.
Fear is the friction in transitions.

- transcribed by Jay Oglivy
at Rollo May’s house,
May 19-th, 1983